Suppose you were selected to fulfill a dream. Youd have to recruit
and head up a 12 to 15 man expedition into 8,000 miles of unexplored
wilderness and bring back the first maps, a journal about what you saw
and the native people you met, and specimens of any new plants and animals
you found. But first youd have to arrange the means of transportation,
recruit your men, buy food and clothing for them, and learn how to provide
medical care for your Corps of Discovery in the wild.

Whats Your Problem?
How long would it take you to get ready?

Now put the year at 1801-1802. No computers, telephones, cars, freeze
dried food or K-rations...and your rifles and boats must be made by
hand. Plus you are in the American East, where most roads west of the
ocean are still dirt, or cobbled at best. The few large cities where
supplies are available are many miles apart. Horseback takes about seven
miles an hour. Mail goes by horseback. Now how long do you think you
would need?

Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis faced just such a challenge when he was
appointed by President Thomas Jefferson to be his personal aide in 1801.
He realized during his next two years in the new President's House in
Washington that his Commander had just such a dream and that he, Lewis
himself, was to be THE MAN!

Whirlwind Period is Keystone of Success
After two years at Jefferson's elbow, handling the usual work of a presidential
aide during slave/sex innuendos and a war with the Barbary pirates,
foreign intrigue over Louisiana, and frequent tutoring by the owner
of greatest library then assembled, the now-Captain Meriwether Lewis
got ready within five and a half months of 1803, in Harpers Ferry, Lancaster,
Philadelphia and western Pennsylvania.The period was the keystone to
success for the western exploration.

Leaving Washington March 14 , 1803, on horseback with letters of introduction
in his saddlebags, and a military letter of credit, he rode into Harpers
Ferry arsenal where he spent a month ordering hand built rifles, knives,
pipe tomahawks, and fish gigs and designing a folding iron frame boat
to be built for the trip.

On April 19 he continued on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied
the use of celestial navigation instruments for three weeks with the
leading American surveyor, astronomer and navigation expert, Andrew
Ellicott, a member of the American Philosophical Society (APS). A friend
of Jeffersons, Ellicott had laid out the boundaries of the nations
capital. Lewis also ordered more rifles, the Pennsylvania long barreled
rifle made in those parts.

Finally! On the Road to Philadelphia
In early May, Lewis rode the 63 miles into Philadelphia on the first
gravel road in America, with letters of introduction from Jefferson
to four other members of the APS.

Mathematician Robert Patterson helped him polish his use of the instruments
and helped him to buy them in what is now old City and then calibrate
them.

Drs. Benjamin Rush and Caspar Wistar of the Pennsylvania Hospital,
tutored him in medicine, native peoples, anatomy, and archeology, and
Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, also of the Pennsylvania Hospital, and botany
professor of the University of Pennsylvania, covered known plants and
animals, collecting, and how to label and store specimens for the return
trip.

All three doctors asked Lewis to learn as much as possible about native
people he would meet, and Dr. Rush gave him a list of specific questions
to ask the tribes.

Collecting the Impedimenta Lewis also spent time buying 3,500 pounds of supplies at the Schuylkill
Arsenal and in Society Hill and Old City areas of Philadelphia and arranging
for a Conestoga wagon to carry it all, picking up the items at Harpers
Ferry, out to his chosen boat builder in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, near
Pittsburgh. He was to build Lewis a 55 foot keel boat by July 20.

All of this done, Lewis (until now the only Captain of
the Expedition) returned to Washington on June where he and Jefferson
incorporated the suggestions of the Philadelphia mentors into final
instructions for the expedition. Realizing he would need help, Lewis
then wrote a letter to William Clark inviting him to join the Corps
of Discovery and one to his mother, Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks saying
hed be home in a year and a half.

On July 4th, 1803, the day before Lewis again left Washington to travel
to Pittsburgh to struggle with a difficult boat builder, the 27 year
old nation received a birthday present. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the
United States for 60 million francs. Lewis was assured at least that
he would not be entering a foreign country on his expedition. He left
on July 5, tying up loose ends in Harpers Ferry on the way. As in all
good plans, something was amiss.

Dealing with a Glitch!
The Conestoga wagon had not picked up the cargo from the arsenal, and
Lewis had to hire an additional wagon to take it to Elizabeth. To make
further delay, he arrived at Elizabeth on July 15 and found the boat
unfinished. His 29th birthday came and went on August 18. There was
still no boat. Finally by August 31 Lewis and a dozen men were able
to begin poling down a tributary to reach the Ohio River.

In Cincinnati, he received the famous letter from Clark, who wrote,
in the unpolished spelling of most Americans of the time, I will
chearfully join you .. In November, he was poling down the
drought stricken Ohio River towards the Mississippi to pick up Clark
and more men in Indiana Territory.

So why, you wonder, did your history book say that the Expedition began
in St. Louis, struggled to cross the Rockies and reach the Pacific Ocean,
and then return to St. Louis?

Two hundred years later, from August 9-13, 2003, 800 members of a national
organization called the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation will
be meeting at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel on Market Street to study
this story and its Philadelphia connections. For details of how to be
involved, visit www.lewisandclarkphila.org. The web site was created
by Anne Mackintosh, a retired teacher from Haddonfield Friends School
with grant funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities.